You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.

...which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?

I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.

Don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that. And living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on Earth.

The only answer to this, and it isn't an entire answer, said Father Travis, is that God made human beings free agents. We are able to choose good over evil, but the opposite too. And in order to protect our human freedom, God doesn't often, very often at least, intervene. God can't do that without taking away our moral freedom. Do you see? No. But yeah. The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation.

There are people who are always, I think, going to remain people of the book, to use another author's title, but people of the book, who really must be around.